Metro Matters; Stale Austerity: Unused Lights Darken Roads

What finally persuaded Robert J. Kellner that he was not just imagining the problem was when he decided to count the lights instead of cursing the darkness.

About 40 percent of the street lights on the West Side Highway didn't work, he found. Nor did about half on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

''This disgraceful condition is unsafe and inexcusable,'' wrote Mr. Kellner, who commutes by car daily from Riverdale in the Bronx to Manhattan, where he is senior vice president of Cross & Brown, the real-estate brokers.

''What happened to the service company that is supposed to maintain these lights in working order?'' he said in a letter to The New York Times. ''Where is the highway commissioner who is supposed to oversee this company? And finally, where is the Mayor, who is ultimately responsible for this commissioner?''

''You have no idea how many calls I've received from people I hadn't heard from in years,'' Mr. Kellner said. At best, his figures represent another good-government agenda gone awry. At worst, they are emblematic of an unbudgeable bureaucracy.

If anything, city officials call Mr. Kellner's estimates conservative. Indeed, they say much of the blackout was deliberate.

It began 11 years ago, when the energy crisis and the fiscal crisis gripped the city simultaneously. People were encouraged to turn off the lights when they left a room.

Somebody in government got the bright idea of turning off the street lights, too, perhaps as he left town.

A proposal to dim the lights in residential and commercial neighborhoods was abandoned because of concerns about crime. But officials went ahead and disconnected 6,000 of the 22,000 lights on limited-access highways. The fiscal and energy crises have long since eased, but nobody turned the lights back on.

Apparently nobody even seriously considered doing so until last year when responsibility for all 330,000 street lights was shifted from the Department of General Services to the Transportaton Department.

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''The first thing I wanted to do was to turn on all the lights on the Belt Parkway, but I was told I couldn't,'' said Steven J. Galgano, the chief of signals and street lights.

The 6,000 lights, as it turned out, also had been unplugged from the city budget. Why do we need them anyway? Before the blackout, one city agency compared accident reports on the Long Island Expressway and Northern Boulevard in Queens, where the roads were illuminated, and in Nassau County, where they were not. A similar survey was conducted on the Bronx River Parkway in the Bronx and in Westchester.

According to those comparisons, motorists were safer in the dark because the lights gave them a false sense of security. Try convincing Mr. Kellner. Why not turn off all the lights then?

Mr. Galgano said that though there is no demonstrable link between the number of accidents and the amount of light, there is some correlation in the severity of accidents. Also, he said, the glare of background lighting makes street lights more needed on urban highways.

The Automobile Club of New York has been lobbying to restore the lighting to ''levels state authorities felt were necessary for safety'' when the highways were built.

''The state has a standard,'' Mr. Galgano agreed, ''and we are requesting money so we can conform.''

He estimates it would cost the city $500,000 to replace poles that were felled, spaced farther apart when roads were reconstructed, or otherwise lost. Electricty and maintenance would cost another $500,000 annually.

The city's yearly electrical bill for all 330,000 street lights is $55 million, plus $16 million for maintenance.

The deliberate blackout is not the only legacy of the fiscal crisis. Stretches of highway have been dark for years because old underground cables broke and were never repaired.

Also, complainants who called to report a broken street light could reach a live human voice during the day but only an answering machine at night - when people, who take the lights for granted, are most likely to notice those that do not work. A new complaint phone number will be staffed full time. (On any given night, 96 percent of all street lights are said to be working, which means that 12,000 are not. During any given day, the department figures, about 3,000 lights are on, unnecessarily).

Highway lights don't command the same priority as many other municipal services. But New Yorkers who conduct their own street-light census are likely to lose faith in the city's ability to deliver. Its failure to turn on the lights after so many years suggests that somebody has been asleep at the switch.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 1987, on Page B00001 of the National edition with the headline: Metro Matters; Stale Austerity: Unused Lights Darken Roads. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe